Omens of the Past and Future
by Eve-Mag
Summary: Almost surreal.


by Soleramnus

The dank, industrial level of the Federal Intelligence Office Assembly plant on Bereye IV groaned to halt as night on the station set in. It was a station in the heart of Gallentean space, but taken well for granted as it stood in the shadow of Oursulaert, the trade hub of Essence. Everyshore was something of a backwater region—there was no cognitive center for it. It had never regained its former glory during the colonial periods as a region of rich ore fields. Rich miners had long since gone elsewhere. Now only half-funded stations and a string of thug-inhabited low-sec systems fondly termed "the noose" were its greatest features.

Needless to say, it was the perfect place to begin a small, specialized manufacturing operation. Just close enough to the hub—just far enough to require its own market. No one, after all, paid attention to Everyshore.

A Gallentean woman—tall, red-haired, lithe in form, and clad in bronze and gold-colored fashion, walked down the industrial corridors that were riddled with grease, exhaust vents, and the flickering lights of half-occupied warehouses. Somewhere, a boy moaned as a girl teased him, her laughs echoing down the metallic surfaces.

Soleramnus turned—listening for a moment—an old memory suddenly interrupting the usually placid surface of her mind. She turned again, clearing the thought, and allowed her footsteps to be the only echoing sound she paid attention to.

At the end of the rust-covered hall the passageway terminated into a large, padlocked door. She stopped at it, looking over the head of the pentagon-shaped entrance where a single symbol hung, embedded in the metal, and unusually bright and polished against the surrounding rust—it seemed to glow with its golden, crescent-shaped form, coming together at the bottom where a circle would join, but then terminating in two, upward-turning segments.

Nearly fifteen years ago an ancient man—a wandering Intaki teacher on Luminaire, whom she met by chance—or, perhaps, by fate—revealed this symbol to her. It seemed to be almost Amarrian in its shape, but was still unlike anything she had seen before. And he confirmed this to her, telling that the symbol—this simple shape—predated any of the four major empires by eons, even the Jove. It had belonged to a different time entirely… a time dating back to the days of the EVE Gate, and possibly even further back than that. Its original meaning now long lost, including its name, the Intaki man believed that only in the right hands would its true purpose be realized—and that, within the spirit of the person who held it.

Soleramnus looked down from omen-like shape to the keypad on the right. She touched it, and the only red light on its surface turned yellow, blinking. She spoke that man's name:

_"Keshatria."_

The light turned green and the door opened. Soleramnus walked through.

As the ceiling floodlights flickered to life the dark space revealed itself to be a massive warehouse, dingy and empty. The only inhabiting containers were huge deliveries of salvage—exploded tritanium bars, fractured armor plating. Burnt micro chips. All waiting to be reused—to be smelted together for custom ship modifications. Rigmaking had become Soleramnus's most frequent and profitable profession, if taxing at that—she had no workers and often spent the days crawling over electrified capacity batteries that needed a rig install. And now that her corporation had chartered a new system that allowed members to start their own business, Soleramnus was the CEO of her own rigmaking business, complete with her own office in a station that held great manufacturing potential, however backwater it was.

She flipped open her neocom, scanning the various blueprints she had to work with—and then switched to scanning the various contracts available through the Jita network. Eight of them were active, and she was the highest bidder. Tipped off by her corporation's CEO who knew much, much more about the universe than his calm and comfortable demeanor betrayed, these blueprint contracts were wild gambles. Investments, so to speak, but investments in technology that few knew about—or cared to know about, really—but had the potential to be a market in their own class. Pulling one up, the holographic display showed the schematics for a simple armor repairer. Tech I—nothing apparently special about it. Except that it required ancient relics in the manufacturing process that most people wouldn't know what to do with—or know what they were worth. Those items, found in locked canisters in the middle of the most remote sectors of space, were the remnants of ancient, forgotten races—space-faring peoples who predated the four major empires, but left their traces in the various technological clues they left behind. Somehow, someone found a way to use these perplexing technologies to modify a rather typical looking Tech I item to nearly match—if not beat—the technological capabilities of its Tech II counterpart. And though not even the Jita item database could track the items, much less the blueprints to make them, Soleramnus knew that there were hundreds of such items—waiting for the right person who truly knew their worth, their possible uses, and most importantly—the arcane, esoteric knowledge it took to craft them—to utilize the creative potential.

She flipped off the neocom. All these parts—the useless junk of salvaged materials in making rigs, pulled out of pirate wrecks and sold for cheap by the pod pilots destroyed them; the miscellaneous blueprints that, for most manufacturers, were useless, and came from abandoned laboratories; the paradoxical artifacts found on the edges of regional space that usually belonged in museums rather than a manufacturing hangar floor. The discarded, and the forgotten in the world. Born again—renewed, into something that no one else had thought possible. It was all reflective of a single pattern—a strange word the Intaki had taught to Soleramnus long ago—'reincarnation'. But more than just an eternal cycle of reuse and rebirth; the process was compounded by each step so that it amplified itself—the product became exponential over time. Until, finally, it came to a grand, unknown conclusion.

At least, so the old Intaki had taught.

'Sol' smiled, and on replacing the neocom into her shoulder harness, looked down. Crouching on the metal, manufacturing hangar floor, her finger traced the line of where she had order the warehouse caretakers to engrave, of all things, the same symbol—a dark, obsidian version of the same crest above the entrance door—into the floor. Perplexed, they did it all the same, as money made men obey any word.

And here, on this manufacturing floor, that symbol laid as a reminder to Sol, and anyone else who came through this hangar, of what exactly she was about. Who she was… and where she was going.

_"Nova,"_ she whispered. Somewhere, that girl's laugh echoed into her ear again, and it reminded her of words from long ago—which she now spoke with the voice of a woman. It blended with the voice of an Intaki wanderer, echoing from some recess inside her memory:

_"To die a violent death—and return again, new."_


End file.
